Timeless Art

From their perches on the walls surrounding John Nichols during his workday, some 10,000 clocks count out every second. It’s a beautiful racket, to his ears at least, because he makes his living repairing the timepieces that few others can, or will.

“When I first opened back in 1971, all my neighbors were TV and typewriter repair shops, mom-and-pop hardware and general fix-it stores,” recalls the Greek native, who moved to the U.S. in 1968 and changed his name from Yannis Nikolopoulos. Now typewriters are quaint relics, it’s cheaper to buy a new television set than to mend an old wreck, and his Montana Clock Shop in Santa Monica is boxed in by chic boutiques. “Today,” Nichols says, “I’m not sure people value fixing things much.”

Unless the things are clocks and watches. We seem to expect them to stand the test of years. Americans spend $1 billion annually on products designed to do no more than record time and hand prized pieces down through the generations, keeping alive family memories and the history of design.

Witness the clutter of the Montana Clock Shop’s workroom, which is stuffed with 19th century French skeleton clocks, coral marble mantle clocks, dramatic hand-painted Teutonic grandfather clocks and scores of wristwatches--solid-gold Rolexes, a Vacheron Constantin, a Tiffany encrusted with diamonds.

Customers mail their disabled time-keepers to Nichols from across the U.S., from Honolulu at one end of the map to Miami on the other. Many own more than one broken piece; just the other day a woman opened up a billowy bag and dumped 18 out-of-order watches onto the counter.

The most expensive watch Nichols has ever patched up was a Patek Philippe valued at $85,000, which didn’t impress him: “It’s the inside that’s a thing of beauty.”

When he first hunched over a repair bench, he was 14, an elementary school graduate in his native Argos. He had found his profession. At 55, he says he still gets lost in what he calls the “delicate intricacies” of clock innards. He has the steady hand, the infinite patience and “the ability to focus on things sometimes the size of dust,” which, he says, probably mark him as one of “a dying breed.”

Is society killing off the art of horology by abandoning the watch and clock for the cellphone, the iPod and the digital time-tellers in the corners of computer screens? Nichols is familiar with predictions of the death of the watch.

“I think that’s a little rumor,” he says. “I have kids 12, 13, 14 still bringing their watches in to be fixed. I don’t think cellphones will ever replace watches. You can’t wear a cellphone on your wrist.”